Robert Samuelson told readers in his latest column that we need not worry that people are undersaving for retirement. Unfortunately this conclusion rests largely on a confused reading of the data.

Samuelson starts by telling readers:

"In 2010, roughly 80 percent of households headed by someone 65 to 74 owned their homes reports, economist Peter Brady of the Investment Company Institute, the trade group for mutual funds. ... For all homeowners, median home equity — the amount not owed on the mortgage — was $120,000."

Another way of putting this is that 60 percent of households in the 65-74 age group had less than $120,000 of equity in their home. With the median house price now near $200,000 this means that many of the 80 percent who owned homes still had far to go to pay them off.

Samuelson continues:

"To supplement Social Security, retirees can borrow against their home equity. They can also draw on retiree savings from defined benefit pensions, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and 401(k) accounts. In 2010, almost three-quarters of households aged 55 to 64 had some combination of these retirement vehicles. The median value of the IRA and 401(k) accounts was $100,000, Brady says."

It is interesting that Mr. Brady says that almost three-quarters of people in the age group 55-64 either had retirement accounts or defined benefit pensions. (Note that we have shifted age groups here to one with lower rates of homeownership and less equity in their homes.) The Federal Reserve Board put the percentage of people in this age group with a retirement account at 59.6 percent, with a median holding of $100,000. This means that 70 percent of people in this age group had less than $100,000 in assets. If we assume this will be drawn down over a 20 year period, it implies annual income of roughly $5,000 a year or $400 a month.

That's better than nothing, but if the only other source of income is a Social Security check that averages $1,300 a month, this will not get people very far. And, 70 percent of retirees will have less.

Paul Krugman has devoted two recent blogposts to address complaints from heterodox economists over Thomas Piketty’s new book. I have written several pieces on the book and made my own view quite clear. I think it is a great book and I am happy to see it bring so much attention to the growth in inequality over the last few decades, even if Piketty gives short shrift to policies that could reverse this rise in inequality.

Rather than dealing directly with the dispute over Piketty, I will take some issue with Krugman’s account of the mainstream and the crisis. Krugman writes:

“It is true that economists failed to predict the 2008 crisis (and so did almost everyone). But this wasn’t because economics lacked the tools to understand such things — we’ve long had a pretty good understanding of the logic of banking crises. What happened instead was a failure of real-world observation — failure to notice the rising importance of shadow banking. Economists looked at conventional banks, saw that they were protected by deposit insurance, and failed to realize that more than half the de facto banking system didn’t look like that anymore. This was a case of myopia — but it wasn’t a deep conceptual failure. And as soon as people did recognize the importance of shadow banking, the whole thing instantly fell into place: we were looking at a classic financial crisis.”

To my mind this seriously mischaracterizes the nature of the downturn we have experienced since 2008, with important real world consequences. I have long argued that the crisis is really the story of the housing bubble and its collapse. However entertaining it might have been, the financial crisis was secondary.

Eileen Appelbaum and Heather BousheyUS News and World Report, April 25, 2014

The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Dean Baker
CNN Money, April 25, 2014

FiveThirtyEight looks at the bubble horizon and concludes stocks and housing are safe, but we should be worried about bonds. The analysis here is seriously misguided.

First as a sidebar, contrary to what you read at FiveThirtyEight, real house prices are somewhat above, not below, their long-term trend levels. That doesn't mean we have a housing bubble, but anyone anticipating a future rise in nationwide house prices in excess of inflation is likely to be disappointed.

But the more important point is that the concern about a bubble in bonds is largely illusory. The piece constructs a case for a bond bubble that just is not there.

First, I was surprised to read that the size of the U.S. bond market is almost $40 trillion, which the piece rightly points out is considerably larger than the $28 trillion stock market or the $20 trillion housing market. When I checked the source for this number I discovered that the figure referred to the total size of the debt market, not just longer term debt that we would typically refer to as "bonds." The FiveThirtyEight figure includes 90-day T-notes and money market funds.

This is not just a question of semantics. Longer term debt (with a duration of five years or more) has large fluctuations in value in response to a change in interest rates. The price of shorter debt will also vary, but the size of the changes is trivial by comparison. This means that if we are worried about a bubble inflating bond prices, we should really only be looking at longer term debt. The size of this market would be roughly half as large, or less than $20 trillion. That's still big, but a considerably smaller basis for concern than the piece implies.

More importantly, the room for losses in this market is not nearly as large as it was in the case of the stock or housing bubbles. The stock market lost more than half of its value from its 2000 peak to its 2002 trough. House prices lost more than one third of their real value from the 2006 peak to the 2011 trough. By contrast, it is difficult to envision a scenario where the bond market loses even 10 percent of its value.

Early on in his (rightly) highly complimentary review of Thomas Piketty'sCapital in the 21st Century, Paul Krugman declares: “This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.” Krugman is certainly correct ab